Analog SFF, April 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She found her way back to her seat. O'Doul looked her over skeptically. “Are you sure about that Josh person?"

  Lucinda snapped back into focus. “Of course. He's a very good—” She sighed, and a smile crept onto her face. “He's someone who loves me."

  He accepted that latest half-truth. It was enough for her now to say that much. “He's someone I love” could come later.

  Her reverie ended when O'Doul made the connection to the examining room. A flat screen to Lucinda's side showed a figure inside an older model MEG. He was lying down, his face and torso hidden. Plastic chaining bound his wrists and ankles. Above one manacle was a device clamped around the leg.

  "A shocker.” O'Doul must have noticed it. “Hope they've got lots of spare battery packs."

  It was the first angry word Lucinda had heard from him. Had they been using it on the prisoner already? Not during the interrogation, she thought: she would have seen clear signs of pain.

  Kate walked into the margin of the picture, and stood in silence. The soft music they usually employed to relax a subject was missing. It was just Kate and the prisoner, and presumably guards off-screen.

  "My name is Katherine Barber,” she finally said. Lucinda took notice. Kate never used her full first name. “Will you tell me yours?"

  Nothing. Kate filled the time by working a stylus across her pad.

  "There are extremely grave charges laid against you. Do you understand them?"

  Still nothing.

  "You are accused of shooting down a security aerostat over Washington, facilitating a nuclear attack on the city. Do you confirm or deny that you did this?"

  He said nothing. His brain yielded a bit more. Lucinda watched his medial prefrontal cortex creep deeper into the blue. Kate's questions became more specific, but his silence remained as complete.

  "Looks like he's enjoying himself,” O'Doul said. Lucinda thought he was reading far too much into the tenacious passivity.

  Kate went on without result, until she walked out of shot in quiet frustration. Lucinda looked for camera controls, but before she found anything, Kate was back in the edge of the screen.

  "Maybe you were fleeing from the scene too fast to see how powerful that bomb was. The news is estimating seventy-five kilotons, but I've heard higher numbers here, ninety or one hundred. Hiroshima was destroyed with a twelve-kiloton weapon."

  Kate began striding closer. “You do know, don't you, that your bomb didn't just destroy a few national landmarks? It killed other human beings, tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds. It crushed them under rubble, roasted them alive when it didn't just vaporize them, or showered them with radiation so their bodily functions are falling apart, this moment, from the inside out, until—"

  Kate's voice, already cracking, gave out altogether. But then why were her lips still moving, her hands chopping at the air?

  Lucinda saw O'Doul's hand on the volume switch, now turned off. His other hand was over his face, tense and trembling. She couldn't bring herself to turn the switch back. She spotted an earpiece, plugged it in at her console, and got the sound back for herself alone.

  "—blowing across Maryland, poisoning it with those salted isotopes."

  Kate had grown shriller still. Lucinda moved to dial down the volume, before something in the holotank caught her eye. She forgot Kate.

  "Dr. O'Doul. Edwin!"

  O'Doul raised his head, and Lucinda pointed at his tank. The frontal areas were indigo now, but her finger indicated the limbic system, and the cingulate cortex brightening into orange.

  Raw eyes met hers. “I know. What did you think I meant?” Before Lucinda could fashion a reply, he braced himself and turned up the sound.

  "—from your action.” Kate was hoarse and phlegmy. “People you knew; people you liked—the way I lost people I knew. Colleagues. Friends. A man I loved.” Her voice shattering with the last words, she turned away, close to sobbing.

  In the holotank, the cingulate cortex peaked at a dull red. Lucinda double-checked the most active neurons. They were indeed dopamine producers. Kate's litany of horrors, and her breakdown, had brought the prisoner a strong surge of pleasure.

  There was a whimper. Lucinda was never sure whether it was Kate's, O'Doul's, or hers. Kate was looking at her own monitor now, seeing what they did, realizing what they had. She looked around her, grabbed and hefted some hard object, but after only one step toward the prisoner, let it crash to the floor. She left the shot again, leaving no doubt she wouldn't be back.

  "We've got more work ahead than we thought,” Lucinda said, not trusting her voice past a whisper. “Let's find the best matches.” She started putting together two sets of pattern recognition parameters, one for the frontal structures and one for the cingulate cortex.

  They outlined specific neural pathways and structures, the ones responsible for the prisoner's most important reactions and affects. They ended up using two pattern recognition routines, hers linked up from Berkeley, his from Johns Hopkins. Both finished in less than ten minutes. Their short lists mostly overlapped, giving four matches for the frontal cortices and three for the cingulate cortex. No brain template was on both lists.

  Lucinda frowned. “Have you ever done an overlay using two separate templates?"

  "No,” said O'Doul, “but it won't raise problems if the two areas aren't connected. That means damping dopamine production at the cingulate source, rather than cutting off their effects in the frontal lobe. I had intended that anyway. We don't need all that dopamine floating around."

  "Certainly not. Still, I think the frontal lobe should be our priority. We'll get the best match we can there, then pick the cingulate structure that meshes best with it."

  "I concur."

  They both shuffled through the scans, to find their matches. Lucinda felt an odd sensation creep over her as she examined the frontal structures. Someone's walking on my grave, she thought, before realizing she couldn't have made a worse comparison at that moment.

  "Hm. Mislabeled."

  "Come again?” Lucinda said.

  "This scan,” O'Doul responded. “I assume you took it, but it lists you as the subject."

  "ID doesn't matter in—” She suddenly knew why something had seemed familiar. “Actually, I did provide a template for our research. Me and Pavel,” she said, trailing away.

  "So this is yours?"

  "Yes. It's me.” Her mind began churning. “It has to be me."

  "If you say so. Now, out of these templates, I—"

  "No, Doctor,” said Lucinda. “I meant we have to use mine."

  O'Doul gave her a guarded look. “I was going to say, Dr. Peale, that the third template appeared best suited."

  "Under any other circumstances, I'd probably agree. Right here and now, though, my template has an advantage the others can't touch."

  "And what can that be?"

  She pulled herself straight. “Me, here."

  * * * *

  "Are you certain, Lucinda?” Kate still sounded froggy, and her eyes were painfully red.

  "It's our best chance to produce a successful overlay,” Lucinda said, walking past Kate into the scanning room. One of the guards followed them inside, the other closing the door behind them.

  "Are you sure it's not becoming personal?"

  Lucinda wheeled on her. Kate's expression was stern and adamant, but she soon began to color. “It's personal for all of us,” Lucinda said, “but look at it outside all that. Will this give us greater precision in attacking the specific attitudes we need to erase, or won't it?"

  Kate's jaw ground tightly. She finally shifted her eyes. “All right. Get in."

  Lucinda didn't wait for a less grudging invitation. She laid herself on the examination bed. It felt warm, but still gave her a chill to think of who was lying there moments before. Now he was being prepped for surgery. O'Doul was still upstairs, observing, recording, preparing his overlay template.

  Kate set the restraints for Lucinda's head and uppe
r body, then went to the control panel. The bed slid into the scanning tube with a slow grind. New equipment apparently didn't get into this complex very often. She made herself not think about what that could mean for the overlay procedure.

  The bed stopped and locked. Suddenly, it was very quiet. Lucinda tried to keep her mind clear, unperturbed by the emotions under the surface. She started reciting the Greek alphabet, forward and backward, an old calming technique she hadn't used for years.

  "Dr. O'Doul's messaging,” Kate said. “He says to stop thinking in Spanish: it could confound the baseline with signals from the language centers."

  Spanish? Lucinda almost laughed. Having O'Doul misled by her looks was a comfort of sorts. If magnetoencephalographic scans were the key to “mind-reading,” as some thought and feared, scientists didn't quite have the knack yet.

  Things got quiet again for a minute. Just as Lucinda got used to the calm, Kate began talking. Her words came slower than with the prisoner, and no longer had the personal, accusing tone and content. Mainly, they were still the same words, the same recitation of terror, destruction, death, and despair. It ended this time with “People we knew, people we liked.” The same colleagues; the same friends; then the admission from Kate that Lucinda could not match.

  It was over sooner than Lucinda had expected. She could have borne no more of it. The emotions she had held down in the observing room broke through here, where metal and plastic shielded her from view. Tears flowed, and she could not stop them, or even move a hand to wipe her eyes.

  The bed began pulling out. She made a supreme effort of will to staunch the tears, and only made herself heave with a sob. She couldn't even turn her head or cover her face. She screwed her eyes shut, the only thing she could do.

  She felt Kate looming over her. “I wondered when it would come,” Kate said. The restraints came loose, and Lucinda opened her eyes to see Kate offering her a hand up. She took it, using her free hand to wipe her face. Kate moved as if to hug her, but stopped and handed her a fistful of tissues instead.

  Lucinda got her face almost dry. “Have I ruined the template? Or..."

  "No. You doubled its effectiveness, if anything."

  Lucinda hoped she was right. She didn't want to burn up the time for a second scan.

  Kate went over to a workstation and found a mic. “Is that scan going to be sufficient, Dr. O'Doul?"

  "Ample, Ms. Barber,” came over the speakers. “Lucinda, can I have you up here?"

  "Right away.” She waited for Kate to close the link. “Kate, you should check the operating room. See that their equipment is up to our standards."

  "Sensible enough,” Kate said, just a bit anxiously.

  They left the scanning room. The guards at the door followed them, one apiece. Lucinda felt hers like a weight between the shoulder blades. Once Kate and her shadow were safely down another corridor, she looked back. “I hope I'm not taking you from serious duties, corporal."

  "Guarding you is my duty, Doctor,” he answered, with a Southern accent too clipped to be a drawl. “I take that seriously."

  Lucinda shook her head. “Do they really think someone's going to get under this mountain and assault me?"

  "After this morning, I don't assume anything's safe."

  She couldn't argue with him.

  Building overlay templates was a job for neurosurgeons. Lucinda had only assisted Dr. Urowsky a few times with producing them; with Pavel, never. She was glad she had that modest experience, because it would have been too disturbing to have O'Doul building something out of her brain patterns while she sat to the side, doing nothing.

  It was still creepy with her involved. They took the potentialities of strings of neurons, matching them as closely as possible with the captive's so they could replace one with the other. Those were the patterns, the tendrils of her thoughts, or at least the physical architecture that produced those thoughts. It was like having a mirror to look into her own soul.

  The process usually took several hours. O'Doul had completed the work for the cingulate cortex while she was being scanned. Finishing up the frontal cortex took less than an hour with Lucinda's help. Finally, O'Doul pushed back his chair, gazed pensively at the screens, and nodded.

  "You're ready, Doctor,” Lucinda said in encouragement.

  "Me?” said O'Doul. “Not we?"

  "I'm not a neurosurgeon, Doctor, or a nurse. I've only attended one overlay."

  "That's probably one more than anyone else they could provide me here,” O'Doul said, “unless there's been another abduction we haven't heard about. Even if there has, I should like to have someone in there that I know, even a little."

  There was only one response: the one Lucinda wanted. She had hoped to participate all the way, but that needed to be O'Doul's decision, and now it was. “Then let's go,” she said.

  By the time they dressed, sterilized, and entered the operating theater, the procedure had already begun. The subject was anesthetized, and a nurse was shaving off the last of the hair on his skull. “No transcranial stimulation?” Lucinda asked.

  The nurse flicked away the last of the hair, and looked up. “No time to bring in a TMS machine,” she said, the eyes above her mask dark and narrow. “We got the electrode-placing robots in just two hours ago. Mount Weather wasn't meant to be a research hospital. Sorry."

  "No, I understand.” So, this place did have a name.

  "Of course not,” O'Doul echoed. He looked over the available equipment, including the smaller MEG the OR had. “Yes, this will suffice. Is everyone ready?"

  Ready or not, they had no time to waste, and they began. A sterile wrap went over the patient's head, with two holes over the entry sites. O'Doul made the first incision at the crown, peeling away the skin and fastening it back with tiny clamps. Then came the bone drill, neatly cutting out a plug of cranium the size of a dollar coin. O'Doul slit and parted the dura, and there was the brain, right where the frontal lobe blended into the parietal.

  He and Lucinda threaded the electrode filaments down the longitudinal fissure between the hemispheres of the brain, getting them close to the cingulate cortex. From there, they fed instructions to the tiny robots attached to the filaments, to guide them down to the precise locations needed for the electrodes. “Looks good,” O'Doul finally said. “Let's get him in."

  They slid the operating table to get the patient's head inside the MEG. Lucinda went to the control panel for the electrodes, and sent some test pulses. O'Doul looked over the scans that resulted, and found two electrodes slightly misaligned. They pulled him out, and got to reprogramming the microrobots.

  "Does it always take this long?” their nurse said as she applied suction to clear some pooling blood.

  O'Doul scowled over his mask. “There is no hurrying brain surgery."

  "Transcranial is much faster,” Lucinda added. “Your bosses should get a TMS machine here, if they want us doing more of this."

  "You think that's likely, Doctor?” O'Doul asked.

  "I can't imagine whoever masterminded the attack dealt directly with this guy. There are always layers. It might—"

  "You might want to stop speculating,” the nurse snapped. Lucinda was taken aback, but neither she nor O'Doul said anything.

  The second time was the charm, as the test pulses showed everything in place. “Start the overlay sequence,” O'Doul said. Lucinda touched the button, and it began. Currents flowed through into the brain, shaping old neural pathways into new networks of activity.

  "I can monitor the repotentiation,” Lucinda told O'Doul, “if you want to take a break.” The overlay would need more than an hour to impose its pattern.

  "Not at all, not at all. Better I keep my mind occupied."

  They kept their vigil, almost superfluous as the program did its work. Lucinda took intermittent looks at the patient. The MEG housing obscured part of his face, and the rest was blank, revealing nothing. She looked hard for some sign of what was happening inside his mind, before
she made herself stop.

  The program ran until the patient's MEG scans matched the template, and they could bring him out. Once the electrodes were out, the nurse replaced the plug of bone and sealed up the scalp, while the doctors opened the second hole over the prisoner's prefrontal lobe. The electrodes went in, the patient went back into the MEG, and the overlay began again—only this time it was Lucinda's pattern being imprinted.

  She didn't feel the shiver of horror any longer. In its place was vague worry, that the procedure would fail, that she would bear double blame as participant and template. She tried to think of other things, but after enough thoughts of Washington, of Nancy, of Sam, she retreated to the worry of failure. That might go away before long.

  From the first human trial of neural overlay, Lucinda had wondered whether this procedure effaced personhood, changed the soul. It had nagged her quietly with each person who underwent it, no matter what acts he had committed. She noticed she didn't feel that worry now.

  "I think it's done. Do you concur, Dr. Peale?"

  She shrugged off her musings, gave the display a look, and concurred with Dr. O'Doul. They pulled out the subject, withdrew the filaments, sealed up his skull, and put in a shunt. It was while O'Doul was applying wound glue to seal the incision that Lucinda noticed the anesthesiologist pulling out the IV. “That's a little early,” she said.

  "We need him awake and talking as soon as possible,” he answered.

  "That means topical anesthetics for his scalp,” the nurse added. “No opiates or other narcotics."

  "Yes, okay,” Lucinda said. She hadn't forgotten their urgency. “Can someone call Kate Barber? She should be on hand when he wakes, for the interview."

  Two disbelieving stares met her words. “We have people to handle that interview,” the nurse said. “We won't need Barber, or you."

  "What?” Lucinda said, in unison with O'Doul. “But someone has to monitor the MEG,” she went on, “to see how the templates have taken hold, to—"

  "We'll handle that.” The eyes above the mask softened. “It's very late. You two have to be tired."

  "I'm on West Coast time,” Lucinda said feebly. The nurse didn't answer, going instead to the OR door. She called in two orderlies, and told someone else to make sure the recovery room was secure.